I'm Bob Bringhurst, the lead writer for the Digital Publishing Suite.

Updated (9/22): Excerpts from InDesign Books

Adobe has an agreement with Adobe Press and Peachpit Press that allows me to request excerpts from books to be published on the web. Once these excerpts are made available, I link to them from the related Help topics. If you can’t find the information you need in the Help topic, you may be able to answer your question in these books.

In September 2009, several excerpts from the great InDesign CS4 Real World book were made available.

6 Responses to Updated (9/22): Excerpts from InDesign Books

How do I do barcharts and pie charts in InDesign? Read about doing in Excel and export out to Illustrator but cumbersome. Anything better? Doing alot of revisions for a fin’l document. Anything to make it easier would be appreciated.[I’m not aware of anything better than the Excel/Illustrator workflow. You may want to ask this in the user forum:www.adobe.com/support/forums-Bob]

I do this all the time and have two different work flow solutions. As far as I know, there is no plug-in to do this directly in InDesign. Since I consider the rest of the CS Suite plug-ins for ID anyway, I don’t see the need.1) Excel to PDF- for ones that come from someone’s else’s design or idea that you must use or you are under a time crunch. Make sure you clean it up (remove legend, etc.) before either ‘Save As..’or export to PDF from Excel or ‘Open’ in Acrobat.2) Illustrator to .ai- for ones you need to dress up really swell. The ‘Graph’ tool hasn’t been updated in the last decade but it is usable. I use the 3D effects to ‘wow’ the punters.Import either into InDesign. Keep them as data in your ‘Images’ folder always! Don’t ever convert them to art (in other words, don’t disconnect the chart from the data in the spreadsheet), so you can do the inevitable changes that come down.

How do I use the color pattern on a photo and turn it into a swatch to use for fill on text? For example, if I have a photo of the sky and I want my text to be blue with clouds… I want to know how to create a swatch from a photo. Sampling with the eyedropper just give me the one pixel of color and not the entire pattern.